The modern world has long been organized through binaries — nature and culture, centre and periphery, body and machine, life and nonlife. These oppositions shaped not only thought but also the global infrastructures of extraction and representation. The so-called centre, holding the means of visibility and control, defined what the periphery was allowed to be: raw, primitive, or resourceful, depending on its usefulness.
Yet the boundaries between these poles are now dissolving. Digital networks, ecological collapse, and post-pandemic forms of interdependence have revealed how fragile and entangled this order truly is. What was once peripheral becomes central in other ways — as a site of resilience, repair, and situated knowledge.
Peripheria x cor emerges within this shifting terrain. The project challenges inherited imaginaries of the Baltic region — often framed as rustic, manual, and low-tech — by exposing the politics of such narratives. It seeks to rethink what “periphery” can mean when the heart (cor) of the system begins to beat elsewhere: in the overlooked, the reclaimed, and the slow material intimacies that refuse the logic of extraction.
Amber
Do resources simply subject to the whims of their extractors and users?
Are objects merely a backdrop to human existence – created and waiting to be filled with foreign will to act, be valuable, or be unnecessary?
Egyptian pharaohs, Greeks, Romans, medieval and later European elites, and subsequently, empires and occupying regimes not only adorned themselves with amber but also expansively used it as a mean to pursue political goals and establish status. Centers of power drew resources into themselves, recording once-distant peripheries, such as the amber-rich shores of the Baltic Sea and our ancestors' tribes, into written history.
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